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California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

reuters.com

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Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#211

Post by paxys »

solveit wrote: post #191
cp9 wrote: post #122

if people weren't VC brained they would realize that the way to prevent traffic deaths isn't to build fancy self driving cars, it's to invest in safer, more pedestrian friendly infrastructure and use the boring technology that already exists to get people where they want to go. the future is on buses and trains and bikes and pedestrian friendly 15 minute communities

I agree with the sentiment, but given America's, uh, great affinity for cars and car-centric infrastructure, nailing self-driving seems easier....

That's what we all initially thought, but with a decade and a half of constant engineering effort and tens (maybe hundreds) of billions of dollars poured into the space with basically nothing to show for it, I wonder how true that assessment still is.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#212

Post by stfp »

cryptoz wrote: post #73
reset2023 wrote: post #69

[flagged]

Something like 30,000 Americans alone are killed every year in car accidents. I think the primary idea is to reduce the constant death on the road by making machines that are safer at driving than humans. The toll that car accidents have on society is honestly unconscionable.

We need to stop the deaths now, not in 15 years if and when the tech becomes good enough and adopted etc.

Every other country has seen a reduction in the number of deaths over time, without self driving cars.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#213

Post by RC_ITR »

Lonestar1440 wrote: post #202
RC_ITR wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with what you said, BUT From my perspective as a person who lives in San Francisco and also bikes a LOT: human driver also do not perform acceptably. I counted 14 cars without headlights on after sunset on a 2 mile bike ride yesterday. I counted 5 cars parked in either a bike lane or active traffic. 2 cars took blind rights (no stops) onto Polk from various alleyways. This was a good day, FWIW. Cruises have o…

Yes, Humans are flawed drivers. But that makes them an Excellent baseline, because the last thing we want to do is make things even worse. I've observed all the things you did (in fact, all of them on Sunday). But I don't do any of them, and you probably wouldn't either if you ever used a car. I'm comparing self-driving cars to an average Human, who truly does drive acceptably. Over 99% of people drive acceptably. Th…

>Cruises have obvious problems, but my hope is we don't use humans as a baseline, because they're not very good either.

Yeah we agree?

The point is human drivers aren't a proportions problem. It's that any unsafe driver is bad.

Adding more safe drivers doesn't lower the risk of unsafe drivers, even if they're a smaller proportion of drivers.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#214

Post by bonestamp2 »

RC_ITR wrote: post #186
Lonestar1440 wrote: post #120

From my perspective as a person who lives in San Francisco and also drives a LOT (10-20k miles per year, and many small drives within the city): Cruise cars do not perform acceptably. They manage to avoid collisions by driving extremely conservatively, but the way they traverse, say, a left turn against traffic is absurd. They slow everyone down, including emergency vehicles and public transit, by performing far belo…

I agree with what you said, BUT From my perspective as a person who lives in San Francisco and also bikes a LOT: human driver also do not perform acceptably. I counted 14 cars without headlights on after sunset on a 2 mile bike ride yesterday. I counted 5 cars parked in either a bike lane or active traffic. 2 cars took blind rights (no stops) onto Polk from various alleyways. This was a good day, FWIW. Cruises have o…

> I counted 14 cars without headlights on after sunset on a 2 mile bike ride yesterday.

This one could be fixed tomorrow by adopting regulations that other advanced countries have had for decades.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#215

Post by mumblemumble »

mariusmg wrote: post #181
yegle wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The AV braked aggressively before impact and because it detected a collision, it attempted to pull over to avoid further safety issues," Cruise added. "When the AV tried to pull over, it continued before coming to a final stop, pulling the pedestrian forward. Our thoughts continue to be with the victim as we hope for a rapid and complete recovery." This looks like Cruise's fault, dragging a pedestrian while pullin…

>This looks like Cruise's fault Imagine having to write the code that "detects" if a pedestrain is caught underneath the car

It's not clear to me that this is purely a software problem; it might be a "the car doesn't even have the sensors necessary to detect this kind of situation" problem.

It could also be a "the software can't anticipate that this would be happening the way a human can because it doesn't have object permanence" problem. That's probably at least part of how a human would do it. But I have a suspicion that we're very, very far away from being able to get computers to do that in any sort of reliable way. So I'm guessing we're probably looking at specialized sensors if we want to handle this kind of situation appropriately.

Basically some sort of self-driving car equivalent of a human driver getting out of the car to check and make sure everything's OK.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#216

Post by epaulson »

What's the ratio of humans back at headquarters ready to take over vs the number of cars active on the road? That's a really interesting number that I don't think I've ever seen reported anywhere.

It does feel like a lot of these weird/longtail situations should be more quickly resolved with some better combination of letting a human override in person (like when a AV car blocks a firetruck) and/or quickly getting a human to remotely take over, but yet we keep seeing these reports of where the car does something dumb for a long period of time. Is it as simple as they don't have enough employees on-hand to intervene?

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#217

Post by WesternWind »

_ea1k wrote: post #151
yegle wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The AV braked aggressively before impact and because it detected a collision, it attempted to pull over to avoid further safety issues," Cruise added. "When the AV tried to pull over, it continued before coming to a final stop, pulling the pedestrian forward. Our thoughts continue to be with the victim as we hope for a rapid and complete recovery." This looks like Cruise's fault, dragging a pedestrian while pullin…

Yes, and it sounds like a fairly fundamental flaw. Does the car have sensors that can determine pulling over is the wrong thing to do in this situation? In general, getting out of the way is the right course of action, but this clearly shows that there are exceptions. I'm not sure that the vehicles are currently equipped for differentiating to even be possible.

Can the car detect screams of pain? Because I as a driver can.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#218

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

RC_ITR wrote: post #186
Lonestar1440 wrote: post #120

From my perspective as a person who lives in San Francisco and also drives a LOT (10-20k miles per year, and many small drives within the city): Cruise cars do not perform acceptably. They manage to avoid collisions by driving extremely conservatively, but the way they traverse, say, a left turn against traffic is absurd. They slow everyone down, including emergency vehicles and public transit, by performing far belo…

I agree with what you said, BUT From my perspective as a person who lives in San Francisco and also bikes a LOT: human driver also do not perform acceptably. I counted 14 cars without headlights on after sunset on a 2 mile bike ride yesterday. I counted 5 cars parked in either a bike lane or active traffic. 2 cars took blind rights (no stops) onto Polk from various alleyways. This was a good day, FWIW. Cruises have o…

If humans aren't the baseline then what is?

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#219

Post by EA-3167 »

cp9 wrote: post #122

if people weren't VC brained they would realize that the way to prevent traffic deaths isn't to build fancy self driving cars, it's to invest in safer, more pedestrian friendly infrastructure and use the boring technology that already exists to get people where they want to go. the future is on buses and trains and bikes and pedestrian friendly 15 minute communities

At the very least the testing phase for self driving vehicles should not be taking place on public roads. I didn't sign up for some alpha test of potentially deadly tech, and no one else did either.

Re: California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

#220

Post by spaced-out »

mariusmg wrote: post #181
yegle wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The AV braked aggressively before impact and because it detected a collision, it attempted to pull over to avoid further safety issues," Cruise added. "When the AV tried to pull over, it continued before coming to a final stop, pulling the pedestrian forward. Our thoughts continue to be with the victim as we hope for a rapid and complete recovery." This looks like Cruise's fault, dragging a pedestrian while pullin…

>This looks like Cruise's fault Imagine having to write the code that "detects" if a pedestrain is caught underneath the car

That's not hard for me to imagine. Now that I think about it, it should probably be standard for autonomous cars -- if there's an accident or something unexpected it should pull over, unless it can't reach the side of the road without hitting something or someone is trapped under the car.
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